The bizarre world of Patrick Byrne's Overstock

[mandy]

The latest: Overstock's Byrne calls the SEC corrupt - and offers a 10% off coupon. 

Our Corrupt Federal Regulator the SEC + 10% Discount Coupon 

Dear Reader,

Two years ago I became convinced we were standing at the edge of an economic crisis perhaps comparable to the 1929 market collapse, due primarily to the SEC having become a "captured regulator" which turned a blind eye to the fraud it was created to suppress. The proximate cause of systemic failure, I argued, was that our financial system was building up latent derivative risk (in the form of unsettled trades in our settlement system) among a vast network of hedge funds and their prime brokers. But the conditions for collapse were created, I argued, by an indolent SEC...

full (lengthy) letter: http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=17841

Letters to the New York Times:

Dear Sir or Madam,

In your July 16 article, "July 16, 2007 - The Hand That Controls the Sock Puppet Could Get Slapped" your reporter made a claim that was false. In addition, he had to go way out of his way to make it.

Since you have not previously even responded to my requests for citation, I decided simply to make this one public.

Explanation welcome.

Patrick Byrne, CEO, Overstock.com

full letters: http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=17711

[mandy]

Related:

Russian Mafia in bed with Wall Street, CEO says

Every day, thousands of Americans look to invest their money in stocks, and many of them go through brokers and traders to simplify the process.

Unfortunately, according to Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a majority of those purchasers will be victims of Wall Street's criminal tactics and will help line the pockets of corrupt brokers and lawyers. Byrne, a Utahn who founded Overstock.com, talked to a crowd in the Union on Monday about how New York financial media and law firms have teamed up with big-wig business elites to create massive amounts of profit at the cost of American consumers...

full article: http://media.www.dailyutahchronicle.com/...2089.shtml

and from Patrick's blog:

I now turn to Gary Weiss. Last year one of the most prominent journalists on Wall Street warned me, “I’ve known Weiss for years. Be careful. He’s a psychopath.” As you will see, he was neither joking nor exaggerating. I think, however, that Gary is better described by the term, “Scaramouch.”...

Gary Weiss, formerly a reporter with BusinessWeek and currently a columnist at Forbes, has actually spent over a decade posting under a variety of fake names on Usenet groups, stock message boards such as Yahoo!, and on Wikipedia, in a remarkable attempt to confuse, distort, and hijack social media so as to cover-up criminal activity...

full article: http://community.overstock.com/deepcaptu...sychopath/
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[sneakymagenta]

Would somebody please buy him one of these?